Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By : Rachel Cordone
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By: Rachel Cordone

Overview of this book

Unreal Development Kit is the free edition of Unreal Engine—the largest game engine in existence with hundreds of shipped commercial titles. The Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool for game development but with something so complex it's hard to know where to start.This book will teach you how to use the UnrealScript language to create your own games with the Unreal Development Kit by using an example game that you can create and play for yourself. It breaks down the UnrealScript language into easy to follow chapters that will quickly bring you up to speed with UnrealScript game programming.Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript takes you through the UnrealScript language for the Unreal Development Kit. It starts by walking through a project setup and setting up programs to write and browse code. It then takes you through using variables, functions, and custom classes to alter the game's behavior and create our own functionality. The use and creation of Kismet is also covered. Later, using replication to create and test multiplayer games is discussed. The book closes with code optimization and error handling as well as a few of the less common but useful features of UnrealScript.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – Using handler functions


We're going to take a rocket ship to goofy town on this one. The easiest way to learn about handler functions is to use an already existing Kismet action, so we're going to use the Toggle action on our AwesomeWeaponUpgrade actors to see how they work. To let us know that it's working, we're going to make the weapon upgrade actors change the size and color when the toggle's handler function is called on them:

  1. Open AwesomeWeaponUpgrade.uc in ConTEXT.

  2. The first thing we need to do is give ourselves access to the static mesh so we can change its size and color. Let's add a variable to reference it:

    var StaticMeshComponent MyMesh;
  3. Now let's change the static mesh part of the default properties to add a line:

        Begin Object Class=StaticMeshComponent Name=PickupMesh
            StaticMesh=StaticMesh'UN_SimpleMeshes.TexPropCube_Dup'
            Materials(0)=Material'EditorMaterials.WidgetMaterial_Y'
            LightEnvironment=MyLightEnvironment
            Scale3D=(X=0.125...